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Sport And The American Dream

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Sport And The American Dream
Emile Somekh
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In Jeffrey Schranks’ short story, “Sport and the American Dream”, he is trying to show us that the sport America watches and plays, portrays America’s character as a nation. Since America goes from baseball to football we it shows us that we are becoming more violent. his comparisons of sports and war is says best how America changes as a country over the years. Back when baseball was Americas’ pastime to being a totally football country. When we were a baseball country, Americans were happier, not many cared about wars or violence just the enjoyment they got from watching the games with friends or family at the ballpark. It didn’t matter that the sport wasn’t moving at a fast pace or so competitive. Football is the sport that we now follow; and is the overly aggressive sport that we all love. This sport is all about being competitive from having fantasy football for people of all ages to people betting a lot of money on stupid things like the coin toss, the first play, the first commercial and so on. Also there are only 16 games in football which makes it that much more competitive, unlike baseball that has 162 games. This sport with very war like features tells us that America is a very active and very war-like country. Jeffrey Schrank was a teacher and a freelance writer from Milwaukee, he wrote novels in the 1960s-1970s. This short story just sums up how America has become such an angry and aggressive country. Schrank was writing this at the time of these events: Vietnam war, the cold war, the bay of pigs invasion, stonewall riots in New York City, the Cuban missile crisis, and many more horrific times. This is most probably what inspired this piece because he is so into how wars affect the culture of all Americans. The comedian George Carlton had a stand up discussion on this very topic, football versus baseball and he had a couple things to say about both sides. He said, “Baseball is played in a park and football is played on a

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